The HTC One SV is one of the best looking phones on the market, yet it's priced affordably. Available in the UK and on Cricket Wireless in the US, the One SV sells for $279 without a contract after a $50 rebate. You've got to like orange if you're thinking of picking up the Cricket version, but we don't mind because it's complex and stunning shade. The Android smartphone has a curved back and at first blush it looks like one of HTC's unibody designs, but in fact the One SV has a removable rubbery plastic back panel that offers full acess to the 1800 mAh battery, micro SIM card and microSD card.

In terms of specs and power the HTC One SV sits between (surprise) the HTC One S and the HTC One V. It has a lovely, though not terribly high resolution 4.3" Super LCD2 display with Gorilla Glass 2 running at 800 x 480 resolution. It's nonetheless a very colorful, bright and sharp display with wide viewing angles and pixels and jaggies aren't on obvious display.

The HTC One SV runs on a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus CPU with Adreno 305 graphics. It has a gig of RAM and 8 gigs of internal storage. Cricket includes a 4 gig microSD card that's partitioned with 3 gigs dedicated to their Muve Music content and 1 gig for your use. The phone has dual band WiFi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, a GPS with GLONASS (Google Maps and Cricket's navigation solutions are on board), NFC and a front 1.6MP camera. The phone runs Android 4.0.4 with HTC Sense 4.1 software.

The rear 5MP camera uses HTC's ImageChip and it offers HDR, panorama and 1080p video capture. It has a fast f/2.2 lens. Images are pleasing and video has decent detail given the resolution. The 5 step flash is supposed to set flash brightness as needed but we found it hit or miss.

Cricket Wireless is one of our smaller national carriers and they have coverage in most metro regions of the US. They use CDMA network technology as do Sprint and Metro PCS with whom they have coverage sharing deals. Cricket offers 3G EV-DO Rev. A and the carriers has started rolling out their 4G LTE network. Their no-contract deals are appealing to those who detest commitments and their retail phone prices are very competitive. Phone availability varies by market according to their website, and the HTC One SV appeared as available when we used a Chicago zip code but disappeared when we entered a Dallas area zip code where Cricket has fine coverage.